xAI, Elon Musk’s newly formed AI company, has revealed itself with a new website detailing its mission and team at https://x.ai/. Musk tweeted the company’s intent is to “understand reality” without any other details or explanation.
“The goal of xAI is to understand the true nature of the universe,” according to the website. The team is headed up by Elon Musk and includes team members that have worked at other big names in AI, including OpenAI, Google Research, Microsoft Research, and DeepMind (which was recently folded into Google).
In addition to Musk, the website lists Igor Babuschkin, Manuel Kroiss, Yuhuai (Tony) Wu, Christian Szegedy, Jimmy Ba, Toby Pohlen, Ross Nordeen, Kyle Kosic, Greg Yang, Guodong Zhang, and Zihang Dai. xAI’s team is currently advised by Dan Hendrycks, a researcher who currently leads the Center for AI Safety, a nonprofit that aims to “reduce societal-scale risks associated with AI.”
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The @xAI team will be hosting a Twitter Spaces discussion on July 14th, where listeners can “meet the team and ask us questions,” the website says. No specific time was given. According to xAI’s website, the company is “separate” from Musk’s overarching X Corp “but will work closely with X (Twitter), Tesla, and other companies.” Musk recently imposed strict but apparently temporary limits on reading Twitter, blaming the change on scraping by AI startups seeking data for large language models (LLMs).
We first heard about xAI in April, when filings indicated that Musk founded the company in Nevada. At the time, it had Musk listed as its director, with Jared Birchall, the director of Musk’s family office, listed as its secretary. Not much was known about xAI at the time, but reports suggested that Musk sought funding from SpaceX and Tesla to get it started.
Musk has been part of a major AI organization before, co-founding OpenAI in 2015. However, he walked away from it in 2018 to avoid a conflict of interest with Tesla, which also does a lot of work in the field. He’s since openly criticized OpenAI and told Tucker Carlson he was working on building something called “TruthGPT.”
By: Jay Peters and Emma Roth
Originally published at The Verge
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